Understanding "How Students Learn, Both Generally and in the Subject"

A debate around the appropriateness of generic preparation for teaching in higher education has been in progress for some time; however, logistical difficulties of providing discipline-based preparation for teaching have meant that few practical experiments have been conducted. Requirements for national accreditation as a teacher in higher education were first published in the UK in 1999 by the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and reformulated in 2006 by its successor organization, the Higher Education Academy. The question of whether there are subject-specific models of student learning in use, with or without a scholarly underpinning, is one which opens up the way the sector understands disciplinary differences in learning and teaching. The conclusion of this study was that models of learning have a cross disciplinary applicability despite a tendency to question and criticize generic models of student learning from the perspective of being inapplicable to a particular discipline.